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Within four years of its première at the Little Theatre, Haymarket in August 1787, Colman’s and Arnold’s Inkle and Yarico had been produced as far afield as New York, Philadelphia, Jamaica and Calcutta; in London it would hold the stage for half a century. Yet if it is still remembered at all today, it is only for its status as the first ‘anti-slavery opera’. Hence the appearance of this highly entertaining revival, staged at the conclusion of a day-long conference to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Is the work of more than historical interest? The music is certainly unflaggingly tuneful, but is rarely the main focus, serving predominantly to break up the action. The drama meanwhile, though advertised here as semi-staged (with scenery provided by projected images) was fully and funnily acted, mixing strong debate with engagingly witty banter. And the inclusion of some more extended musical pieces – such as the Guyanan princess Yarico’s meditation on nature, ‘Sweet bird’ (long a successful piece in its own right and finely sung on this occasion by Joana Thomé) – provided some room for vocal display.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the work’s erstwhile popularity, no surviving edition of it includes all the various musical numbers, or corresponds precisely to a single production. So for the purposes of this revival, Richard Luckett pieced together all the surviving material before cutting it down to a playable version, dispensing with surplus characters and dialogue, and reducing the three-act original to a more compact two.

The result was occasionally patchwork in character, but in a way that fitted in entirely with the pasticcio norm of the time, lending a credibly late-eighteenth century aura to the performance; this was only strengthened by the contribution of the audience, whether offering audible disapproval of any pro-slavery speeches or spontaneous applause after Andrew Wicken’s virtuosically hammy rendition of Sir Christopher Curry’s grand excoriation of the merchant Thomas Inkle.

Unusually, this is a piece in which the middle classes, exemplified by Inkle, come off worst, assailed for their unethical commercial instincts by both servants and superiors, and Inkle’s last-minute decision to marry – rather than sell – Yarico (browbeaten by Sir Christopher’s outburst) hardly rescues the character and his class from opprobrium. At times, however, the temptation to play for laughs, combined with the evident enjoyment of the audience, risked closing the historical gap between 18th-century opera and modern pantomime so completely that some of the more uncomfortable or provocative sentiments in the script (such as the Irish maid Patty, strongly characterized by Ilana Jacobs) were treated as nothing other than more light relief. As a result, genuine insights about the nature of the debate over slavery or the attitudes to interracial marriage in the 1780s tended to be obscured. But this was perhaps a small price to pay for such a spirited operatic resurrection, generated above all by the strength of individual performances. Most notable here was Andrew Staples as a pugnaciously good-hearted and thoroughly believable Trudge, manservant to Inkle, whose own romance with Yarico’s maid Wowsky (Donna Bateman) provides a happy alternative to his master’s machinations. The small orchestral forces played with consistent verve under the confident and stylish direction of Oliver Gooch.

Benjamin Walton